This describes the potential of using a virtual machine to contain development, for testing system level KDE tools like KDM without mucking up the rest of your system. Also, virtual machine snapshots can be shared with casual developers so they can have an up to date, rich environment for their minor fixes.

In the included example, we set up KDE trunk on a Suse 11.4 Linux Virtual Machine.

We use KVM because it is faster than other free alternatives, and can use multiple processors.

Virtual Machine Setup

Create a KVM virtual machine. KDE 4 fits into 10 GB minimum, I recommend 40GB, one partition. As much ram as you can spare, You will need at least 1GB ram for the virtual machine, 4 doesnt hurt if you have it, install SUSE Linux 11.4.

You will need to set your SUSE CD as your virtual machine's cdrom.

setup for SSH

To be able to log in to your VM using ssh, stop and disable the firewall: